Wilson smiles at last

July 14 2003

Picture: DOMINGO POSTIGLIONEBrian Wilson performs live in Sydney last year.

Since 1967, music fans have mourned Brian Wilson's decision to scrap the Beach Boys' unreleased album, Smile. Now, pop music's reluctant genius is preparing to give his lost masterpiece its first public airing - in concert. Steve Waldon reports.

It was the album that was supposed to take rock music into unexpected places - a recording so ambitious, so musically-transcendent, it would confirm its creators as the agenda-setting pop avatars of 1967.

But the "Summer of Love" came and went, the Beatles got Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band out to stifle the challengers, and an opportunity to shape the musical future was missed.

Famously missed, as it happens. For 35 years, Brian Wilson has been reluctant to discuss the scrapping of Smile - the Beach Boys' follow-up album to 1966's critically acclaimed Pet Sounds. But the legend of rock music's "great unreleased album" has continued to grow and haunt him.

That is why a recent announcement on Wilson's website has caused not just excitement, but consternation: "Brian Wilson, co-founder of the Beach Boys, will return to London's Royal Festival Hall in February, 2004. For the first time in his 40-year career, Wilson will perform his mythical, unreleased masterpiece, Smile."

Ahem. If Wilson is undertaking to play Smile, it is implicit that he has finally resolved in his mind exactly what Smile is. This is contrary to Wilson's position for the past 35 years that there is no such thing as Smile. ");document.write("

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There are a few completed tracks, including the epic Heroes and Villains, the stunning a capella Our Prayer (intended to open the album), the legendary Surf's Up, and it is generally agreed that Capitol Records would have insisted the monster single Good Vibrations (just a tantalising foretaste of where Wilson and the boys were stretching) be included.

Beyond that, there are fragments in various stages of completion, and Wilson's steadfast refusal to say what Smile's exact running order is, or would have been. The other Beach Boys have long lamented Wilson's apparently arbitrary decision to ditch the Smile album, even though they have also conceded they had little understanding of the sheer scope and grandeur of Wilson's aspirations. They had returned from a very successful concert tour of Britain, playing the perfect but ultimately shallow pop that had propelled them to the top of the charts since 1962, to find Wilson ready for them to add their vocals to the elaborate tracks assembled for Pet Sounds.

Whatever doubts that album created in their minds about Wilson's vision of leaping forward from the three-minute single were quickly reinforced.

Within a few months, reliable lyricist Tony Asher and the word contributions of gauche lead vocalist Mike Love were no longer required. Wilson, exploring his new-found status as a musical genius in the Los Angeles arts community, had met Van Dyke Parks, a fiendishly clever wordsmith.

The collaboration was an instant success. Parks's riveting imagery and command of language were galaxies away from the subjects of the Beach Boys' early hits. When combined with Wilson's imposing development of musical notions and the abundance of ideas that were flowing from him, the results were classic.

It is widely agreed that, had Wilson not suffered a fatal failure of nerve, a fully realised Smile would have been an astonishing masterwork, unprecedented in pop music - a sonic delight that might have established the Beach Boys as the pre-eminent rock adventurers, and knocked the Beatles into second spot. In his 1985 book marking the group's 25th anniversary, John Milward's section on the failure of Smile to materialise charts Wilson's descent from inspiration to self-doubt.

"Brian was on to the big picture, and had only to produce the right little pieces for it to fall together," Milward writes. "On one of a number of bootleg tapes from the Smile sessions, Brian can be heard leading a studio ensemble through the instrumental track for Surf's Up. He is soft-spoken but not spaced out - just a gifted guy who, while not knowing exactly what he wanted, would recognise it at once."

As others have done before and since, Milward blames the other Beach Boys, and a host of others who depended on Brian Wilson to churn out brilliant pop, for Smile's demise.

"Brian dreaded recording sessions with the group. The lyrics were a particular bone of contention. Mike (Love), for one, objected to lyrics that weren't transparently clear. Mike had sung most of the up-tempo hits, so what was he to make of the lyrics to Cabinessence? He asked Parks for clarification on one particular line: Over and over, the crow cries, uncover the cornfield. 'Frankly, Mike, I don't know what this means, I can't tell you', Van Dyke answered."

When the Beach Boys pulled out of headlining the Monterey Pop Festival, from which Jimi Hendrix emerged and after which rock music was never the same, the game quickly changed.

By backing down from the challenge of Smile, "the group denied themselves a future beyond their past", Milward writes. "The release of (the album) in early 1967 would have dramatically changed the story of the Beach Boys. It would have immediately solved their problem with 'hip'. The album would have revealed a band at the forefront."

This is why Smile is such a revered relic. It is not some mooted, unreleased bootleg of Bob Dylan jamming, or Elvis experimenting with folk. It is a semi-completed idea that really does exist, enough of which has dribbled out over three decades to taunt fans and critics. They want to hear it, because they already have some idea of just how astonishing and satisfying a genuine, completed Smile would be. But they are still waiting for Brian Wilson to show the world what it is.

In terms of 1967's missed opportunity to lead the counter-culture movement, the Beach Boys knew they had blown it.

When the good-ish substitute album Smiley Smile came out instead, Brian's youngest brother, Carl, the voice of Good Vibrations and God Only Knows, employed baseball vernacular to describe it as "a bunt instead of a grand slam".

In keeping with the intrigue that has always swirled around Smile, Wilson's announcement has some close allies thinking hard. When The Age asked Beach Boys historian David Leaf, a close friend of Wilson's for many years, about next year's Smile tour, he said he was unsure why Wilson had suddenly decided to assemble a playable track order - but he was adamant that it was historic.

"Despite the fact that the record was never completed and never released . . . regardless of all of the history and psychodrama that surrounds Smile . . . be certain of one thing - the music of Smile, released or unreleased, stands as one of the most important artistic achievements of not only the 20th century, but the entire length and breadth of music history. Hearing it all together just might be an overwhelming experience."

Parks, with whom Brian teamed up again for 1995's Orange Crate Art album, was wonderfully enigmatic: "When, and if I know more of Brian's plans, I'll recite them to you. It took a long time for me to learn how to say 'I don't know!' when, in fact, I don't know."

Veteran bassist Carol Kaye, who played on many of the Beach Boys' hits and almost all the abandoned Smile sessions, was also surprised, but chuffed.

Kaye thinks Wilson has been buoyed by the overwhelming success of his solo tours since 1999 - particularly the reception to last year's Pet Sounds Live concerts.

"This has been the best time of his life lately. He probably feels more responsive to going back to this other part of his life," she says. "He's convinced his fans are with him - and he knows his old studio musicians are, too."

While the specific content of Wilson's rendition of Smile remains unannounced, what can be said emphatically is that his backing band, the Wondermints, will have no trouble doing justice to the vision.

Nobody is pretending they are the Beach Boys, but their harmonies are tight. And instrumentally, the Wondermints could rightly be regarded as the most accomplished musicians Wilson has worked with since the mid-1960s, when, along with Kaye and intuitive drummer Hal Blaine, the cream of studio musicians decorated Beach Boys records.

Wilson's younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, have not lived to see Smile really happen, but it is likely to be to their memory that Wilson sings when he flourishes this last gem from his musical archive.